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Monday, September 02, 2013

Rake

Reality is never what people think it
is. Everyone knows all solid things are empty space, but no one
really thinks that. Reality
is like that: there are empty spaces, and into them come things.
Others. Creatures not native to our reality. Some are alien, some
hostile, some lost, and if magicians have a purpose it is to bind and
banish what is needed to bind and banish. The dangers grown from the
world are something else altogether.

Their
names, judging by the screams over picket fences, are Ethel and
Thelma, and their dispute over a missing garden rake lite more than
new clothing over old skin. The past is seldom what people think it
is either. It's rarely neat, not all tidy and often not very past. An
old wound festers between them, a story told by one seen as a lie by
the other that time and distance has twisted into a tangle I can't
begin to unravel.

If
anyone asked, they would unite in derision at claims that this
dispute is part of any other they have had and they would believe it
wholly and truly as only beliefs that one knows are wrong can be
believed. The past bubbles up between them, all unspoken truth and
bitter regret. I can smooth it down: I have magic enough for that,
even if it would not last. Nothing lasts, perhaps especially not
magic. I could even tell them to forget and give them no choice about
it, but they would lose part of themselves, because this bickering to
each other had come to define them as much as other things do.

I could
fix it with time and effort: insinuate myself into their lives,
seeing deep into secrets even their hearts have forgot, but there's
never time enough. I weave enough magic to touch their children, and
their children after that, strengthening their own desires and needs
to let them see without seeing and know without knowing, so that the
hatred will go no further, so that the past will die with Thelma and
Ethel. It isn't much, but better than nothing.

I walk
away down the road in the direction of away and try not to think too
hard about damage even magic dares not fix. Someone with enough power
could have bought them new homes, thrown gifts at them – a reality
TV show, or a lottery – and caused the past to die that way. Magic
doesn't work that easily and I know, to my cost, not to try and force
such things. So I ignore the urge to push, to meddle, to try and undo
harm that has not become so much a part of them that its loss could
well destroy them. I can remove illusion; I cannot offer new ones to
replace it with and sometimes that weakness to my magic is a deep and
ugly wound all its own.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”